The present invention relates to medical imaging of the heart, and more particularly, to automatic view planning for magnetic resonance imaging of the heart.
Accurate morphological and functional measurements of the heart are essential in clinical applications for diagnosis, prognostic, and therapeutic decisions. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) allows for precise morphological characterization of heart structures. Advances in cardiac imaging techniques have made it possible to obtain high resolution images of the complete cardiac cycle. In recent years, there has been a great deal of efforts focused on developing and improving techniques for automatic cardiac segmentation. However, less attention has been paid to automatic and fast planning for cardiac MRI acquisition, which remains challenging in clinical practice.
During conventional cardiac MRI acquisition, anchoring the heart is typically performed using a multi-step approach involving the acquisition of double-oblique slices in order to localize the long and short axes of the heart. Based on those localizers, the standard heart views (e.g., 2-chamber, 3-chamber, 4-chamber, and short-axis views from base to apex) are planned. This approach is operator dependent and time consuming. For example, a typical cardiac MRI planning protocol begins with capturing coronal localizer images, followed by multi-slice localizers at different orientations in order to align the left ventricle (LV) with the isocenter of the scanner. Next, one vertical long-axis localizer is planned on a transversal slice and one horizontal long-axis localizer is planned on a vertical long-axis view, from which a few short-axis views are planned. Based on the short-axis views 2-chamber, 3-chamber, and 4-chamber views are planned. Finally, the short axis stack is planned on the 4-chamber view. This protocol requires detailed knowledge of the heart for operators to manually plan the views at every step of the process, while the patient remains in the MRI scanner.